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Planetary Science
By looking down, scientists are looking back in time.
Whether you call it 10 quintillion, 10 million trillion, or 10 billion billion, it's a 1 followed by 19 zeroes.
Can two planets stably share the same orbit? Conventional wisdom says no, but a look at Saturn's moons might tell a different story.
Over 50 years since humans last walked on the Moon, astronaut footprints and rover tracks are still visible. But they won't last forever.
The giant impact theory suggests our Moon was formed from proto-Earth getting a Mars-sized strike. An exoplanet system shows it's plausible.
The outer planets' clouds hide the weirdness within.
"Superhabitable" planets might be real, but Earth is probably as good as it gets.
The cycles of life all rely on the dynamism of the Earth's crust.
The classic picture of Jupiter's great rocky core might be entirely wrong.
Massive objects like black holes, stars, and rogue planets routinely pass near our Solar System. An ensuing comet storm could destroy us.
A next-generation instrument on a delayed rover may be the key to answering the question of life on Mars.
They're the most common type of exoplanet known today, and many astronomers have called them "super-habitable." None of that is true.
Mars, the red planet, was a world we knew almost nothing about until our first spacecraft visited it. In just ~50 years, how far we've come!
This oddball system of three stars might be our best chance at finding nearby life in the Universe.
Voyager 2 flew past Uranus in 1986, finding a bland, featureless world. Now, in 2023, JWST's sights are similar. There's a reason for that.
Many impact craters on Earth have been erased thanks to wind, water, and plate tectonics. But scientists have clever ways to find them.
In our Solar System, even the two brightest planets frequently align in our skies. But only rarely is it spectacularly visible from Earth.
The secret ingredient is violence, and it just might indicate that "moonmoons" aren't as uncommon as most astronomers think.
Some microbes can withstand Earth's most inhospitable corners, hinting that life may be able to survive similarly extreme conditions on other worlds.
On Earth, microbial growth is common in lava tubes no matter the location and climate, whether it’s ice-volcano interactions in Iceland or hot, sand-floored lava tubes in Saudi Arabia.
From astrobiology to geology, a Moon base could serve as a laboratory unlike anything on Earth.
All across the Universe, planets come in a wide variety of sizes, masses, compositions, and temperatures. And most have rain and snow.
Thanks to a couple of rovers, we know Mars was once blue.
Organic molecules can be produced by living or non-living systems. But the recent findings are very intriguing.
With its first view of a protoplanetary disk around a newly forming star, the JWST reveals how alone individual stellar systems truly are.
The James Webb Space Telescope viewed Neptune, our Solar System's final planet, for the first time. Here's what we saw, and what it means.
Yes, NASA's Perseverance rover found organics on Mars. So did Curiosity. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean anything in the search for life.
As recently as 1990, we didn't know of any planets beyond our Solar System. Today, with 5000+, we're deep into the weeds of how they form.
Asteroid collisions aren't always bad.